Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 30

I’ll read anything really esoteric so long as Aleister Crowley’s not in it. Andy Sharp’s ‘The English Heretic Collection’ seems to have avoided that ridiculous old fraud so far, and it’s a real curate’s egg. It provides an alternative mythology for Britain, zooming about between Druids, B movies, magickal wars and old psychedelia while inevitably […]

Esoteric Books For Christmas Under normal circumstances the bookshop tables should by now be groaning with the weight of popular Christmas books. This is the time of year the crowd pleasers come out, but it looks as if this time we’ll have to buy most of our books online. I’m as happy as anyone to buy […]

You don’t need imagination to write drama, you need empathy This week I finished the main draft of ‘London Bridge Is Falling Down’, the 20th Bryant & May novel, and became aware that I’ve entered a new stage of a writer’s life. I started very young with no confidence at all, fooling around with elaborately […]

The Whitechapel Bell Foundry in London’s East End has been in existence in some form or other since the 1570s and has been going like the clappers ever since. Here were forged the bells of St Pauls’, Bow Bells, the great Big Ben bell itself, America’s Liberty Bell and many grand bells supplied throughout European […]

You never know if it’s real or a robot, do you? I’ve been out of the country for the past week, and as this happened at short notice I wrote a couple of articles in advance. But I didn’t pack my laptop. I hadn’t expected to end up chasing turtles off the coast of West […]

In my files I have around 20 projects that have been abandoned. Many of these are adaptations of my own published stories and novels. Some are written intended to be feature films, because that’s what we all wanted to do, write films. It’s a fantasy still entertained by British writers; believing that there’s an infrastructure […]

  Lying for a living is no longer the sole province of the writer. A complaint from a reviewer today about a new historical fiction. ‘It’s interesting, but would have been so much more exciting if we’d known it was a true story instead of fiction.’ Why? The obsession with true stories strikes me as […]

I had a complaint from a reader about the following story, which appeared in the e-collection ‘Frightening’. She said it had kept her awake at night. I said that was the point of writing it. Happy Hallowe’en! The Baby The dingy Edwardian pub was called The Grand Duke, but there was nothing grand about the […]

Writing about London is always a pleasure, but I feel increasingly bad about not covering the rest of the country. Here, though, I am at a disadvantage. Nobody in the history of our family, barring my mother’s missing relatives, came from anywhere other than central London, so there were no trips to the family homes […]

It’s my all-time favourite pastime, ingrained in me since I was about 5 years old. Book mooching involves wandering the London streets looking for secondhand bookshops, chatting to the people who sell books and spending too much money on them. My childhood bedroom was filled with books salvaged from dustbins and borrowed from friends, books […]